Digital Deep Dive: Facebook 3D Posts, Snapchat GIFs & More

The online landscape is ever-changing. New devices, platforms and features are introduced on what feels like a daily basis. We’ve put together a roundup of this week’s biggest stories to help you stay ahead of the curve!

After debuting posts of interactive 3D models that you can move and spin around back in October, Facebook has proceeded to the next stage of development.

3D posts now support the industry standard glTF 2.0 file format, allowing for textures, lighting and realistic rendering. And, thanks to new Graph API endpoints, developers can now build 3D modelling apps or even 3D cameras that directly share to the News Feed.

Also, users will now be able to take 3D posts and bring them into Facebook Spaces, its social VR hangout rooms.

As part of its effort to make private messaging a central feature of its app, Instagram is adding a new feature to the Instagram Direct camera.

Now, when users send a photo or video in direct messaging, they will be able to decide whether recipients can only view it once, replay it temporarily or see a permanent thumbnail of it in the chat log.

Previously, all messages could be replayed temporarily before disappearing completely.

In order to restore advertisers’ confidence in ad metrics after acknowledging previous mistakes, Facebook is planning to clarify the way advertisers measure their campaign performance.

The changes, which were laid out in a recent blog post, include: labelling that states explicitly when an ad metric is an estimate or in development and removal of at least 20 metrics which are considered redundant, outdated, not actionable or infrequently used.

Snapchat is bringing a popular new feature of Instagram Stories to its own app by giving users the ability to add GIF stickers from Giphy to their posts. The new GIF options are available in the Sticker Picker alongside other existing options.

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